Community Update — September 21, 2018

Some critical team updates + community engagement. 📝

We Say Farewell to Our Community Manager

This week we have some bittersweet news to share. As of October 1, 2018 our Community Manager, Justin, will be leaving BlockCAT to take the next step in his career at a local startup in town.

If you’re in our Discord channel, you’ve likely seen Justin engaging and interacting with our Community. He’s been instrumental in connecting our product and engineering teams with the constant stream of feedback from our community.

We’re sad to see him go, but we fully support him on this next step in his career and wish him all the best.

Ongoing Community Engagement

Since we’ve been preparing internally for this transition, a few things have become apparent to the team:

Having a single point-of-contact has inherent limitations

Communication from internal stakeholders can be improved

While having a dedicated point-person for the community has its benefits, other team members can often end up losing context and connection with our community.

We believe our community is one of our most vital assets, so moving forward we’re going to have more members of our team, including Eric, involved in the day-to-day conversations on Twitter and Discord.

Giving the community the time and attention it deserves will be an ongoing priority for the BlockCAT team.

Bi-Weekly Sprints & Updates

We’re also preparing for a few other transitions internally, including adopting bi-weekly sprints as our main method of delivery for the development and engineering teams.

This structure isn’t necessarily new for us, as we’ve been working on a modified version of this schedule for months, but moving forward we are fully supporting the switch in order for us to maintain our timelines for development moving forward.

Since this will fundamentally alter deliverables week over week, we will also be transitioning from weekly to bi-weekly updates on the blog. To be completely transparent, the weekly updates take a good chunk of time to produce, and they lack a clear measure of value for that time invested.

We are confident that we can still obtain the same level of quality, accessibility and usefulness in a bi-weekly format moving forward.

We are committed to keeping the community updated on our ongoing progress, so if there are any questions, suggestions or concerns — feel free to pop them into Discord so our team can address them. 🙏